I love email. What ever happened to it? You could type it on a real keyboard, you could read it in clear print, it was private, messages were as long as you wanted them to be, you could save them, forward them, search them, print them, send attachments with them, file them with their replies.

But they have gone the way of the postal mail that used to have such a big place in our lives. These days, my incoming emails consist mostly of promotions from online merchants, political and charitable bulletins with requests for donations, and the online ghost of my city’s formerly robust newspaper. When I do get actual personal emails from family or friends, they tend to be beautiful photos or collections of funny sayings, which I enjoy, but rarely any personal message.

What are my former correspondents doing? They’re texting. They’re tweeting. They’re posting on Facebook. I’ve tried all of these and found nothing I like or trust the way I do email. And tapping character by character on a tiny picture of a keyboard can’t take the place of using all my fingers to say what I think before I forget I was thinking it.

But that’s the problem. Everybody’s now using their smartphones for things I still do on my computer, or my landline telephone, or my calculator. Or they ask Google or Alexa or Cortina or Siri for anything they want to know. Nobody seems to be as bothered as I am by tiny print and tiny keyboards, tiny buttons and miniature screens.

No matter how determined we are to keep up as we get older, there’s an aptitude gap that just comes from different background experience. Things we used to be good at aren’t used or needed any more so our expertise doesn’t matter. I know how to run a mimeograph machine, look things up at the library, make cookies from scratch, but who cares? Even the computer skills I learned when I was working are obsolete now.

All the signs point to the fact that I’d better learn to text and tweet, and meet the gang on
Facebook. Those options must be fun or the people I miss wouldn’t be doing so much of them. And yes, I realize that some of them are even as old as I am.